Saving the State: Fine Gael from Collins to Varadkar by Collins (review)

Abstract

Stephen Collins & Ciara Meehan, Saving the State: Fine Gael from Collins to Varadkar (Dublin: Gill Books, 2020), 469 pages. While many books and articles have been written about Irish political parties and their leaders at particular periods, there have been comparatively few complete histories. The first point to be made about Stephen Collins and Ciara Meehan’s book is that it provides an overview of the history of Fine Gael and fills a gap in the literature. Stephen Collins has been a long-serving political correspondent, latterly with The Irish Times, still active but now retired, who had excellent access to leading politicians. Having an inside track has enabled him to be a penetrating critic of the political scene. Ciara Meehan is currently a Reader in History at the University of Hertfordshire, who has specialised in the history of Fine Gael in its earlier decades. The narrative pre-1970, which accounts for about a quarter of the book, is coolly historical, whereas the post-1970 period has a feel of having been observed and commented on at close quarters. Understandably, no sympathetic historian of Fine Gael wants to start in 1933, the year it was formed under the transitory leadership of Eoin O’ Duffy, a maverick in uniform whose choice was a serious mistake that took a long time to live down. Nevertheless, notwithstanding other elements, it is legitimate to regard Fine Gael as being largely the successor party to Cumann na nGhaedheal, underlined by the resumption of the leadership by W T Cosgrave in 1934. As the authors admit, the invocation of Michael Collins in the Fine Gael pantheon of great leaders, reflected in the title of the book, is ‘a problematic, selective interpretation of the party’s history. Collins was dead almost eight months before Cumann na nGaedheal was founded and more than a decade before Fine Gael was created’. If Collins was going to be incorporated in the title (in preference to Cosgrave, whose merits never included charismatic appeal), perhaps both Collins and the pre-1922 Sinn Féin party, from which both ‘civil war’ parties sprang, would have benefited from a fuller discussion in the opening chapter. This is particularly the case, given that the first part of the title, Saving the State, clearly alludes in the first instance to the Pro-Treaty government’s success in establishing the Irish Free State, while on its way to winning the civil war. The Collins balance in 1922 is mixed. The issue in dispute was saving the state versus saving the republic, neither yet in existence, but arguably Studies • volume 110 • number 437 116 Spring 2021: Book Reviews as important as either was securing democracy. Dublin Castle was handed over on 16 January to the strongest man on the Irish side, Michael Collins, chairman of the Provisional Government.While the British army’s evacuation was his priority, enough remained to give him vital logistical support at the outbreak of the civil war. The main pitched battles had been won in the first two months before he died, even if there was still a prolonged and destructive rural guerrilla campaign ahead. Collins deserves credit for establishing an unarmed police force, for being the first Minister for Finance, who established the primacy of that department, and for overseeing the drawing up of a constitution, which despite its subsequent British-imposed royalist trimmings contained the essential ingredients of an independent state. On the debit side was his disastrously counter-productive attempt to subvert Northern Ireland, which contributed to the British ultimatum that preceded the civil war, and his repeated postponement of the meeting of the Third Dáil, promptly reversed by the civilian leadership after his death. His legacy to his successors was more problematic than they ever publicly admitted. Establishing a democracy and the primacy of a government elected by the people in the aftermath of the Irish revolution was not as straightforward as it looks in retrospect. While the underground administration established by the Dáil was vitally important, the ultimate decision-making power was more with the army, Michael Collins and Richard Mulcahy on the one side, the likes of Rory O’ Connor and Liam Lynch on the other...